storyboard

a graphical event-by-event enactment of all or part of a scenario, developed to communicate or analyze a user interface design; the enactment may be at a high level (e.g., major screen changes) or at a detailed level (e.g., mouse selections), depending on the usability issue being explored

chunk

a structured collection of information that acts as a single unit with respect to storage and information processing capacity

heuristic evaluation

a user interface critiquing process carried out by experts with usability guidelines

ubiquitous computing

a term used to refer to the increasingly pervasive availability of computational processing in the world around us

human-computer interaction

situations in which people understand and make requests of a software system, and the system interprets and responds to these requests

slip

an error that occurs during action planning or execution when an appropriate system goal was selected

WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer)

the graphical user interface style popularized by the Xerox Star and the Apple Macintosh in the 1980’s

use case

an enumeration of the complete course of events that can take place in response to some user input; the case specifies all possible interactions between the user and the system

Gulf of Evaluation

the psychological distance between what is displayed by a computer and the user’s understanding of how it relates to current task goals

interaction design (ID)

mechanisms for accessing and manipulating the elements of an information design to facilitate the user’s goal selection, action planning, and action execution